Archive for the 'Media' Category

Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe must be pretty upset today. The two founders of monster social networking site MySpace had sold it lock stock and barrel to NewsCorp for $580million in 2005. Just a few months later all of that investment and more ($900million to be precise) was recouped through a deal with Google in which it would became search engine partner for MySpace. And now Rupert Murdoch is considering swapping it for a 25% stake in Yahoo!

At the time, the deal seemed sweet: so sweet, in fact, that many observers thought Murdoch must have lost his wrinkled mind to pay that sum of money for MySpace. But then, in early 2006, Google (yes, THEM again) snapped up upstart online video site, YouTube, for $1.6billion, and its two founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, found themselves a few hundred million dollars richer.

The MySpace duo fumed.

No wonder they took umbrage and started to think they’d been ripped off by wily old Aussie, Murdoch. MySpace had far higher numbers of subscribers than that Johnny-come-lately YouTube and a business model that was bringing in real cash, not just column inches. So, in June this year, Anderson and DeWolfe decided to ask Rupert for more cash in compensation - to the (name that) tune of $12.5million a year each - to stay on after their contracts expired! Murdoch has counter-offered with $7.5million each for two years and, as far as I know, the discussions are still going on.

But, hot off the press (and long awaited) news about a deal between Microsoft Corp and Facebook must be making the two MySpace founders more bitter still. Today Microsoft said it was paying $240million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook - a site a mere four years old that again has way fewer users than MySpace - valuing it at around $15billion (or 25 times the amount MySpace was sold for). Grrr! And Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year old founder of Facebook, frees up some cash for a bit of money for pocket money (to buy a Lear Jet, for instance) while staying firmly in control. GRRRRRRR!!!!

The moral of the tale? There is none. Murdoch is a shrewd dude who saw the potential of MySpace and snapped it up as the, what now looks to be, bargain of the century. Mark Zuckerberg is half a century (53 years!) younger and is every bit as savvy. And DeWolfe and Anderson made it big, but perhaps sold out too early (easy to say in hindsight). So, sorry Tom and Chris. Buy me some Cristal and I’ll help you commiserate.

Poor box office on opening weekend for new Ben Stiller movie, ‘The Heartbreak Kid,’ is being blamed on the huge success of Halo 3, the third in the series of Halo video games by Microsoft Corp’s video game division.

Halo 3 sold $170 million in its first 24 hours of sales when it was launched on September 26, beating out previous record-holder movie Spiderman 3 for the title as biggest entertainment launch ever (of course Spidey 3 was a piece of crap, so it was just a matter of time). This shows how so NOT niche video games now are - they are going head to head with more traditional (read ‘dull’) forms of entertainment competing for the attention and pocket money of the fickle youths. And winning.

‘The Heartbreak Kid’ made $14million in its opening weekend, versus an expected $20-25million. And overall, box office receipts in October is down down down - it’s lowest level since 1999. Studio execs have been wondering aloud whether the success of Halo 3 can be blamed for the lackluster performance.

But we think there might be another explanation. Crap movies. Yes, Stiller’s movie (a project from the Farrelly brothers who worked with him on ‘Something Sticky About Mary’) just isn’t that good. The critics have panned it. If it was a good movie, the video game could wait a few hours. And there’s not much else out there to lure someone into the theater to kill a couple of hours on a Friday or Saturday night.
It’s all about content. And Bungie Studios, the newly independent studio that created the Halo series, got it right, while Dreamworks, the studio that produced the Stiller stinker, just didn’t .

So, movie men, ad people and anybody else in the content business, stop blaming external factors for your failures and start raising your quality standards. Then the people will come flooding back.

Three interesting stories that caught my eye in the last few days:

1. From today’s Los Angeles Times - now that Neilsen is for the first time ever measuring ratings not just of TV that people watch when it is broadcast but also the shows that people “time shift” - er, that means use a Digital Video Recorder to record - shows that might otherwise have been a ratings flop and be taken off the screens, might get some good scores because people are watching them later. So it’s like a stay of execution! Cool.

2. From today’s Ad Age - Rio De Janeiro has decided to ban outdoor advertising, as other big Brazilian city Sao Paulo has done, as a way to reduce “visual pollution.” Other cities around the world have taken similar steps and Ad Age asks if this may be the shape of things to come. I sort of hope so.

3. From every media source everywhere last week - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.com, is thinking of selling 5% of the social networking website he founded for a price that would value the whole thing at about $10 billion. And Zuckerberg is still in his early 20’s. Wow, he’s my hero: not just for creating a great website that people have been drawn to in their millions, but for not selling to Yahoo! last year for a measly billion dollars.

What do all of these stories have in common, I hear you ask?

Well, clearly the shift from old intrusive media formats to new ones that rely on consumers coming to them and not the other way around, contniues. Old media - like big billboards that shout a simplistic mesage in big letters - are a dying breed. Consumers have the controls and are consuming content when they want it, not when it’s fed to them. DVR’s alow them to watch the TV shows they like when they’re good a ready, not when the broadcasters tell them too. Facebook understands the value of loyal consumers that want to hang out with their friends online.

For people who don’t see one another that often and hate the formality of occasional emails or phone calls, Facebook is a fun and effective ways to stay in touch. For marketers and content creators - for they are one - to succeed they need to recognize thhe shift in power from corporation to consumer and come up with the goods that people want. Sounds obvious, but there’s a whole lot of feet-dragging going on.

I’m convinced that the worlds of social networking and multiplayer online games (MMOGs) will soon be one.

They moved a step closer today. It was annouced that superbig Japanese ad agency Dentsu (bless you!) is putting a virtual Tokyo on marketers’ favorite alternate univese, Second Life. They paid many Yen for the virtual landspace, but are convinced the investment will reap big rewards from brands who wish to have a presence in their new virtual city.

It’s funny, but the online virtual worlds found in MMOGs - of which Second Life is loosely one - are usually strange and mystical ones that offer an escape from the humdrom of everyday “real” life, but in Second Life one is being created that more and more is starting to resemble the Real Thing (now there’s an idea - a world EXACTLY like our own called “The Real Thing” and sponsored by Coke). Soon they’ll be so similar, there’ll be little point in going to visit the virtual version. Or will it be the other way around….?

I was pretty uninspired by the sound of Google’s new ad service on YouTube that was announced Tuesday. The way it’s described in the media, about 15-seconds into the video a semi-transparent image appears on the bottom portion of the screen, inviting viewers to click for more information. It disappears after 10 seconds if the viewer doesn’t respond and the viewer can rid of it earlier if desired.

I thought companies like Google got the need to move away intrusive ads. With its Adwords program had found an innovative - and hugely lucrative way - to show “sponsored links” without getting in the way. Yes, apparently Google’s data shows that people don’t mind ads on YouTube, but if that’s the best the Big G can do then I’m not impressed. For years now the TV boys have been using this method of putting ads on the bottom of their shows to plug the next one or some upcoming special, and it ain’t that pretty.

Far more interesting is the idea that you, as a online video viewer, can click things in the video itself to find out more. The technology is available now and it would be fun not knowing by clicking onto something what comes up. Do you remember when VH1 was good they had those bubbles that would pop up on music videos giving spurious info about the person dancing in the background or whatever? Why can’t YouTube do the same, but with the viewer doing the searching? Some clicks could lead to inance and noncommercial funny factoids and others to retailers websites.

Let the viewer do some of the work - they’ll love you for it. If Punk Marketing is about anything it’s about consumers being active participants the conversation not just passive recipients of the information.